Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

Evidence at the trial showed that the defendants took active steps, often covert, to undermine chiropractic educational institutions, conceal evidence of the usefulness of chiropractic care, undercut insurance programs for patients of chiropractors, subvert government inquiries into the efficacy of chiropractic, engage in a massive disinformation campaign to discredit and destabilize the chiropractic profession and engage in numerous other activities to maintain a medical physician monopoly over health care in this country.

The AMA took the decision to the Supreme Court, but the appeal failed in 1990 and thereafter the AMA was forced to alter its attitude. For example, it could no longer discourage its members from collaborating with chiropractors. Although the medical establishment had fought against this move, it had to acknowledge that it resulted in two undoubtedly positive outcomes. First, those doctors who collaborated with chiropractors persuaded many of them to be more sympathetic to the ideas of conventional medicine. Second, it also encouraged many chiropractors to rethink their attitude to their own chiropractic therapy. In fact, many chiropractors were already becoming increasingly disillusioned with the outlandish claims of their founding fathers. Although these practitioners were still committed to using chiropractic therapy to treat musculoskeletal problems, they were reluctant to treat other conditions and were suspicious about the concept of innate intelligence. In short, these rebel chiropractors adopted a more defined job description, namely back specialists. They became known as mixers, because they were willing to mix traditional chiropractic therapy with elements of mainstream medicine.

By contrast, chiropractors who strictly adhered to Palmer’s philosophy were known as straights. They firmly believed every word Palmer had preached, including his core belief that a perfectly aligned spine would guarantee the flow of the ‘innate’ and thus promote well-being throughout the entire body. The split between straights and mixers soon became bitter, with straights accusing mixers of betraying the chiropractic movement, and mixers accusing straights of being quacks. In 1998 Lon Morgan, a mixer, openly expressed his antagonism towards straight chiropractors and their odd beliefs: ‘Innate Intelligence clearly has its origins in borrowed mystical and occult practices of a bygone era. It remains untestable and unverifiable and has an un acceptably high penalty/benefit ratio for the chiropractic profession.’ Similarly, according to Joseph C. Keating, a mixer and a chiropractic historian: ‘So long as we propound the “One cause, one cure” rhetoric of Innate, we should expect to be met by ridicule from the wider health science community.’ In response, straights have accused mixers of not being real chiropractors, because they do not accept Palmer’s basis for chiropractic therapy.

It is relatively easy to find out who is right — straights or mixers — because the former set of chiropractors claims to cure everything and the latter restricts its ambitions to the back and neck. Ordeal by clinical trial is the obvious method for settling such an argument. In fact, many clinical trials have been conducted to test the impact of spinal manipulation on a range of conditions, and many of these were covered within the review of reviews by Ernst and Canter, which was discussed earlier in this chapter. We have already considered their conclusions relating to back and neck pain, but now it is time to look at their other conclusions.

Ernst and Canter looked at ten systematic reviews based on seventy trials that considered spinal manipulation as a treatment for headaches, period pains, infantile colic, asthma and allergies. Their conclusions were universally negative — there was no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any of these conditions.